TY - JOUR
AU - Jackson,, Crystal
AB - Mobile Orientations: An Intimate Autoethnography of Migration, Sex Work, and Humanitarian Borders sits in the emerging traditions of critical trafficking studies and sex work ethnographies. Yet this book is, at its core, a book about migration, “sex/gendered regimes,” and Global North neoliberal governmentality, not a book on sex work per se. In service of new concepts that support his larger theory of “sexual humanitarianism,” author Nicola Mai recounts two decades of diverse data collection, interwoven with strong theoretical grounding. His is a serious intellectual engagement with socio-philosophical questions of sex-gender and the politics of prostitution neo-abolitionism. Whether hanging out with Moroccan men in the streets of Seville, Spain or hanging out with Albanian and Romanian men in central Rome (who refer to exchanging sex for money as “fucking fags,” drawing complex lines around their own sexual selves) or interviewing women in the UK from Moldova and Romania who the government officially declared as victims of trafficking, Mai outlines migrants’ varying forms of agentic and errant mobilities—often young migrants, often with dreams of money and success. These narratives are emblematic of how powerful and how problematic the sexual democracy trope is today. The theory of “sexual humanitarianism” uniquely summarizes a complex web of assistance, ideology, and institutionalization. The theory calls out the ways that mainstream anti-sex trafficking policies and non-profits a) normalize labor exploitation in other jobs, b) unquestionably ascribe to a prostitution supply-demand mythology, c) engage in harmful forms of social control of migrants rather than help them, d) individualize sex trafficking experiences in ways that support Global North nation-states’ violent, racist immigration and prostitution policies, e) all while supporting multinational corporations and NGOs rife with their own labor violations but who get a free pass because they support anti-sex trafficking policies and organizations. This book is a macrolevel critique of Global North governments, of anti-trafficking NGOs and ideology, and, implicitly, of academia (of stale methods and of neo-abolitionist scholarship) through Mai’s mesolevel analysis emerging from intimate microlevel fieldwork and autoethnography. Mai’s book is a deeply embedded auto-ethnography built on a methodological practice he refers to as “intersubjective intimacy.” Mai’s own positionality as a multilingual gay man from Italy, who engages in activism and filmmaking, is at the vector of every interaction. His re-tellings are vibrant, funny, and engaging, thoughtful and self-reflective, as well as serious and heavy. For a book that often uses very big words and relies on several concepts of the author’s own invention, Mobile Orientations is down-to-earth and bracing. This book also reflects why the discipline needs diverse sex work scholars because our identities drive our interests and our access. As I read the book, (and I’d be remiss to not refer to myself in reviewing an autoethnography) I, a bi/queer white cis woman whose scholarship is rooted in the U.S., often wondered how people with other identities would fair, how they would be received both in the field and in our discipline. Someone of a different gender or different race and ethnicity may not have been able to conduct the research as Mai has—and, because of our aggressively gendered world, likely would not garner the same reaction from their scholar peers. Mai’s scholarship starkly diverges from neo-abolitionist prostitution studies that conclude that sexual labor must be abolished fully for there ever to be gender equity and equality for women and girls. Poor people’s migration is, instead, conceptualized as mobility rather than trafficking, and their decisions to sell sex or steal as reflections of varying levels of agency rather than using the hotly debated language of “choice.” They are not “backward immigrants” who need extra help to engage with social services because of cultural deficiencies, or simply not being smart, or whose cultural background justifies migrants’ sexism or homophobia. Instead, migrant men’s “sex-gendered selfrepresentations” make sense in a transnational, neocolonialist context. Mai explains peoples’ contradictory stories as “selfrepresentations” that emerge in and around engagement with multiple agencies and organizations, not contradictory stories of individuals suffering from false consciousness or internalized homophobia. In going to places where other scholars rarely go, Mai is able to identify contradictions and holes between what is said in an interview and in his observations; he pokes and prods at what people say to him; and he can, because he had developed a solid level of trust between himself and his participants. He goes to bars and drinks with folks, he hangs out on bus station steps, he hangs out as others do drugs, he is trusted enough that participants take him to their encampment under a bridge where they live, and chill together on a mattress, talking and listening to a nearby river and the traffic. His empathy and respect for his interviewees and participants is clear throughout the book. He jokingly told a participant to lie to him if that was more comfortable for her. Mai’s methodological practices are purposeful and help him overcome participants’ “official selfrepresentation:” how participants engage in practices “to protect themselves from moralizing, criminalizing, and pathologizing assumptions (and interventions) during interviews and fieldwork” (21). Mai mentions his documentaries often because they are part of his fieldwork; this book would pair very well with his documentaries, but a reader can understand the book without ever viewing the videos. This is a book for anti-sex trafficking practitioners and for graduate classes on migration and transnationalism, on postcolonialism, on critical postmodern documentary filmmaking, on advanced qualitative methods, or on feminist and queer methods; it could be taught alongside Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007) or Elizabeth Bernstein’s Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking, and the Politics of Freedom (2018). Mobile Orientations offers robust interrogations of neocolonialism, anti-sex trafficking policy and practices, migration, class, sex-gender, and place. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Mobile Orientations: An Intimate Autoethnography of Migration, Sex Work, and Humanitarian Borders
JF - Social Forces
DO - 10.1093/sf/soz076
DA - 2019-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/mobile-orientations-an-intimate-autoethnography-of-migration-sex-work-c29WAeLavM
SP - 1
VL - 98
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -